


The First Spring Day

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s06e18 Milagro, F/M, Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-05-24
Packaged: 2021-03-03 09:14:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24348574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: A realization, a quiet moment.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 2
Kudos: 63





	The First Spring Day

There always seemed so much darkness in the spring. Disease and emergencies and such wrenching cases that teetered them over an abyss of loss. Mulder recognized that he had made some mistakes in letting the better, more beautiful days slip by them over the years. He had surely made worse mistakes this year: errors of deliberate blindness. Cruelty, even.

_Agent Scully is already in love._

Because he knew—part of him did, always, which is why he let her suffer (in jealousy, in her own accumulated loss, so often alone). He’d let his own self-hatred bleed into disrespect for any who could love him because how could they? Part of him had been angry with her for staying. Let him feel unworthy of love. Let his misery be complete.

Not anymore, though. Not after he’d seen how much it hurt her: her literal heart’s blood soaking his floor. She was herself, her own, and she chose him.

The sky today was a cartoon blue, like a child had pressed too hard with a robins-egg crayon. The weather report said seventy-five. And he loved her.

“Scully,” he said abruptly, and her gaze broke upward, pen hovering in the air. “Come outside with me.”

She frowned. “I have this thing.” Her pen titled vaguely at the papers on her desk.

“Come outside with me,” he said again, gentler, letting the thought of her face in sunshine smooth the way to self-forgiveness, to something like redemption.

They found grass and put their toes in it. She took off her blazer. He touched the back of her hand and said he was sorry.

She frowned and waited for him to explain.

“For letting you think I…” He shook his head. “You just became so much a part of me that I let myself treat you as badly as I’d treat myself. I’m sorry you thought I’d choose anyone but you.” _Sorry you thought you were alone in love_ , but he was not brave enough for those words yet.

She tilted her head away from him so he couldn’t see her eyes, but she nodded.

After some moments, she said, “Thank you.”

Traffic rattled past and tourists meandered, shouting to each other and clinging to maps, and it was several minutes until her gaze made its way back first to his shoes, then slowly to his face. Her eyes asked that he not hurt her, which pinched something in his chest. He nodded too, biting his lips together.

“I don’t want to get sunburned,” she said.

“Okay.”

He stood and held his hand out to her, keeping his grip on her fingers a few seconds too long. They walked, her blazer folded over her forearm, and he touched the slope of her back because they were, tentatively, each other’s again.


End file.
